I recently acquired an old R5k O2, and it suffers from the famous thrown gear problem in the CD drive unit. I've pulled apart the machine and I have the CD drive and the little white gear, but I can't figure out where it actually goes in the mechanism. I've searched the forums but the posts I came across didn't tell me where it should be. Can someone please help me? I'll take a couple of photos if that helps.

I recently acquired an old R5k O2, and it suffers from the famous thrown gear problem in the CD drive unit. I've pulled apart the machine and I have the CD drive and the little white gear, but I can't figure out where it actually goes in the mechanism. I've searched the forums but the posts I came across didn't tell me where it should be. Can someone please help me? I'll take a couple of photos if that helps.

I recently acquired an old R5k O2, and it suffers from the famous thrown gear problem in the CD drive unit. I've pulled apart the machine and I have the CD drive and the little white gear, but I can't figure out where it actually goes in the mechanism. I've searched the forums but the posts I came across didn't tell me where it should be. Can someone please help me? I'll take a couple of photos if that helps.

Welcome.

Pictures would be good. Someone could add them to the wiki after we've solved your issue. Where the white cog goes is obvious when you see it but some people just replace the entire drive (with for example a yamaha SCSI CDRW).

Just found this thread. I'm having the exact same issue, a thrown COG (luckily it's still intact).

Does anyone know how to remove the off white CD tray from the black assembly piece? My tray is stuck about 1" open, and I can't for the life of me figure out how to remove it so that I can get to the COG motor shaft location.

IIRC it should just pull straight out the front of the drive. If it's really "stuck", though, the gear train is probably bound, which can happen with split pinion as the teeth will no longer mesh near the split. The parts are resilient enough to withstand a reasonable amount of forcing.